Bill Muhlenfeld is owner and publisher of Distinctly Montana magazine and other publications. He lives in Bozeman with his partner, Anthea, and always finds time to enjoy the great outdoors, when he is not writing about it....
The pic that accompanies this piece was taken today on Ted Turner's Flying D Ranch, just outside Bozeman. Turner has done an incredible job increasing the "D's" bison herd from virtually "0" to over 5500 or so head today. If you look closely you can just make out some of the hundreds of calves we saw today on our ride to the Lee Metcalf Wilderness.
Turner's ranch, with its adoption over the last couple of years by a wolfpack, now has every indigenous species originally found in Montana in the days of European discovery.
After efforts to transplant wild sheep stalled last year, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks may now have two project sites in southwest Montana.
The FWP Commission on Thursday gave the department the go-ahead to make a second attempt at introducing wild sheep into the northern Madison Range and to start a study of the possibility of a similar effort on Livingston Peak in the Paradise Valley.
FWP had planned to capture wild sheep from the Quake Lake herd at the southern end of the Madison Range this past winter and transplant them to the Wolf Creek drainage farther north.
But in February, biologists confirmed that three members of the Quake Lake herd had died of pneumonia. Concerned that other wild sheep were also infected and wanting to avoid moving sick sheep, biologists canceled the transplant.
The Beartooth Highway is set to open Friday. The scenic highway that links Red Lodge, Montana, with the communities of Cooke City and Silver Gate, Montana, and the northeast entrance to Yellowstone National Park, is scheduled to open for the season at 9:00 a.m. Friday morning, May 23. Spring road clearing and maintenance is conducted by the Montana Department of Transportation and the National Park Service.
Inside Yellowstone, the road over Dunraven Pass linking Canyon Village, Tower Fall and Tower Junction also opens for the season Friday morning.
All other park roads and all park entrances have already opened for the season.
Most seasonal visitor services in the park open in time for the Memorial Day weekend. Saturday also marks the opening of fishing season in the park.
The National Weather Service forecast for the holiday weekend, calls for partly cloudy skies with a chance of afternoon or evening thunderstorms with high temperatures in the 50s and low 60s, and overnight low temperatures near freezing. Spring visitors to the park are encouraged to have flexible travel plans and to be prepared for a wide range of weather conditions.
Visitors who brave the dusty stretch of Montana 486, known simply as the North Fork Road, are rewarded with striking views of the park and an array of baked goodies – huckleberry bear claws, cinnamon rolls, macaroons, microbrew, coffee, fresh-baked bread and pocket sandwiches – while the shelves of the Merc are lined with practical wares like gauze and parachute cord, power steering fluid and Spam, making it a one-stop resupply shop.
It is a place steeped in a history older than the name “Polebridge,” and the Merc’s “General Mercantile Historic District” is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
William L. “Bill” Adair built the Merc back in 1914, just four years after Glacier Park became a park. He fished, using only one fly (the Coachman), and drank and grew king-sized cabbages while his wife (and later, after she died, a second wife) ran the store and lived in their homestead cabin, which is now the Northern Lights Saloon.
He planted the only elm tree in the North Fork, which still shades patrons of the neighboring saloon, and his transplanted hop vines continue to creep up the saloon wall.
The Merc’s interior still bears the log walls that Adair hand-hewed with a broadax so he could adorn them with wallpaper, and the old glass-cylinder gas pump, which used a pump-and-gravity system to fuel vehicles, remains on the complex.
The Mercantile was originally known as Adair’s, while Polebridge was the store and post office a half-mile north, toward the Glacier National Park entrance.
That second store was owned and operated by another homesteader, Ben Hensen Sr., who opened his store in the 1920s because he thought Adair’s prices were exorbitant. When Hensen was awarded the post office contract, his wife May submitted the name Polebridge, which was accepted.
After efforts to transplant wild sheep stalled last year, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks may now have two project sites in southwest Montana.
The Beartooth Highway is set to open Friday. The scenic highway that links Red Lodge, Montana, with the communities of Cooke City and Silver Gate, Montana, and the northeast entrance to Yellowstone National Park, is scheduled to open for the season at 9:00 a.m. Friday morning, May 23. 
Visitors who brave the dusty stretch of Montana 486, known simply as the North Fork Road, are rewarded with striking views of the park and an array of baked goodies – huckleberry bear claws, cinnamon rolls, macaroons, microbrew, coffee, fresh-baked bread and pocket sandwiches – while the shelves of the Merc are lined with practical wares like gauze and parachute cord, power steering fluid and Spam, making it a one-stop resupply shop.